Breaking down the question
This is a classic first-unit question that tests whether you grasp the relationship between sociology and common sense. The examiner is not asking you to dismiss common sense outright, nor to celebrate it. The phrasing “Do you think” invites a reasoned position, so a one-sided answer will lose marks.
Three distinct tasks are embedded here. First, take a stand on whether common sense can be the starting point of social research. Second, list its advantages. Third, list its limitations. The command word “Explain” means each claim must be justified with reasoning or illustration, not merely asserted.
The trap is to treat common sense and sociology as simple opposites. The stronger position recognises that sociology often begins with common-sense observations but does not end there — it subjects everyday assumptions to systematic scrutiny. This dialectical relationship is the heart of a top answer.
How to approach it
Open by defining common sense as the taken-for-granted, unreflective knowledge that people use to navigate daily life. Then state your thesis plainly: common sense frequently supplies the initial questions and hunches for research, but it cannot substitute for the rigorous, verifiable methods that make knowledge sociological.
Structure the body around the two explicit demands — advantages and limitations — and anchor each with named thinkers. Anthony Giddens argues that sociology has a “transformative” relation to common sense, refining and correcting it. Émile Durkheim, by contrast, warned that prenotions or everyday ideas must be set aside so that social facts can be studied objectively. Holding these two views in tension shows maturity.
Bring in C. Wright Mills to distinguish personal troubles from public issues, and Peter Berger to show how sociology “sees through” the facades of common-sense understanding. For deeper conceptual grounding on how the discipline positions itself against everyday knowledge, see the sociology and common sense note. Close with a balanced verdict rather than a blunt yes or no.
Model answer
Common sense refers to the body of practical, taken-for-granted knowledge that members of a society share and rely upon without conscious reflection. It tells us how to greet elders, why prices rise, or who is trustworthy. The question of whether such knowledge can serve as the starting point of social research goes to the very identity of sociology as a distinct discipline.
In one sense, common sense genuinely is a starting point. Research questions rarely emerge from a vacuum. The sociologist, being a member of society, first notices puzzles through everyday experience — that suicide seems more common among some groups, that caste persists despite constitutional abolition, that migrants cluster in particular neighbourhoods. These common-sense observations become the raw hunches that a researcher then interrogates. Anthony Giddens captures this when he says sociology stands in a continuous, two-way relationship with the common-sense beliefs of the people it studies.
The advantages of common sense are therefore real. It is readily accessible and requires no special training, so it democratises the initial stage of enquiry. It is grounded in lived experience, lending research a sense of relevance and immediacy. It provides intuitive hypotheses that can later be tested. It also offers the researcher a shared vocabulary with respondents, easing rapport in fieldwork. Finally, it supplies a baseline of cultural understanding without which an outsider could scarcely interpret behaviour at all.
Yet the limitations are decisive, and this is where sociology parts company from mere opinion. Common sense is unreflective and often contradictory — it holds both that “opposites attract” and that “birds of a feather flock together”. It is frequently rooted in prejudice, presenting the interests of dominant groups as natural truths, as when hierarchy is justified as divinely ordained. Durkheim insisted that these prenotions be discarded so that social facts could be studied as things, with objectivity and empirical rigour. Common sense also varies across cultures and cannot claim universality, and it resists systematic verification, whereas sociology demands evidence, replicability and logical coherence.
Peter Berger describes the sociological enterprise as “seeing through” the taken-for-granted world, revealing structures that common sense conceals. C. Wright Mills adds that the sociological imagination transforms private, common-sense troubles into public issues by locating them in history and social structure. What begins as everyday intuition must thus pass through the discipline of the scientific method — careful conceptualisation, measurement and testing — before it counts as sociological knowledge.
My considered view is that common sense is a legitimate and often unavoidable starting point, but never the foundation or the conclusion of social research. It supplies the questions; sociology supplies the disciplined answers. The value of the discipline lies precisely in its capacity to refine, correct and sometimes overturn what common sense takes for granted.
Examiner's perspective
An examiner rewards the candidate who refuses the false binary. Answers that simply declare common sense useless, or that equate it with sociology, reveal a shallow grasp of the first unit. The marks lie in demonstrating the transformative relationship — beginning with everyday knowledge and showing how method disciplines it.
Precision with thinkers matters. Durkheim on prenotions, Giddens on the two-way relation, Berger on seeing through, and Mills on the sociological imagination should be deployed accurately, not name-dropped. A candidate who explains why each is relevant will always outscore one who merely lists names.
Finally, the examiner looks for a clear personal position, since the question asks “Do you think”. A balanced verdict — common sense as starting point but not endpoint — signals analytical maturity and ties the whole answer together.